Foundation Models in Autonomous Driving: A Survey on Scenario Generation and Scenario Analysis

For autonomous vehicles, safe navigation in complex environments depends on handling a broad range of diverse and rare driving scenarios. Simulation- and scenario-based testing have emerged as key approaches to development and validation of autonomous driving systems. Traditional scenario generation relies on rule-based systems, knowledge-driven models, and data-driven synthesis, often producing limited diversity and unrealistic safety-critical cases. With the emergence of foundation models, which represent a new generation of pre-trained, general-purpose AI models, developers can process heterogeneous inputs (e.g., natural language, sensor data, HD maps, and control actions), enabling the synthesis and interpretation of complex driving scenarios. In this paper, we conduct a survey about the application of foundation models for scenario generation and scenario analysis in autonomous driving (as of May 2025). Our survey presents a unified taxonomy that includes large language models, vision-language models, multimodal large language models, diffusion models, and world models for the generation and analysis of autonomous driving scenarios. In addition, we review the methodologies, open-source datasets, simulation platforms, and benchmark challenges, and we examine the evaluation metrics tailored explicitly to scenario generation and analysis. Finally, the survey concludes by highlighting the open challenges and research questions, and outlining promising future research directions. All reviewed papers are listed in a continuously maintained repository, which contains supplementary materials and is available at https://github.com/TUM-AVS/FM-for-Scenario-Generation-Analysis.

NeuralOM: Neural Ocean Model for Subseasonal-to-Seasonal Simulation

Accurate Subseasonal-to-Seasonal (S2S) ocean simulation is critically important for marine research, yet remains challenging due to its substantial thermal inertia and extended time delay. Machine learning (ML)-based models have demonstrated significant advancements in simulation accuracy and computational efficiency compared to traditional numerical methods. Nevertheless, a significant limitation of current ML models for S2S ocean simulation is their inadequate incorporation of physical consistency and the slow-changing properties of the ocean system. In this work, we propose a neural ocean model (NeuralOM) for S2S ocean simulation with a multi-scale interactive graph neural network to emulate diverse physical phenomena associated with ocean systems effectively. Specifically, we propose a multi-stage framework tailored to model the ocean's slowly changing nature. Additionally, we introduce a multi-scale interactive messaging module to capture complex dynamical behaviors, such as gradient changes and multiplicative coupling relationships inherent in ocean dynamics. Extensive experimental evaluations confirm that our proposed NeuralOM outperforms state-of-the-art models in S2S and extreme event simulation. The codes are available at https://github.com/YuanGao-YG/NeuralOM.

Advanced long-term earth system forecasting by learning the small-scale nature

Reliable long-term forecast of Earth system dynamics is heavily hampered by instabilities in current AI models during extended autoregressive simulations. These failures often originate from inherent spectral bias, leading to inadequate representation of critical high-frequency, small-scale processes and subsequent uncontrolled error amplification. We present Triton, an AI framework designed to address this fundamental challenge. Inspired by increasing grids to explicitly resolve small scales in numerical models, Triton employs a hierarchical architecture processing information across multiple resolutions to mitigate spectral bias and explicitly model cross-scale dynamics. We demonstrate Triton's superior performance on challenging forecast tasks, achieving stable year-long global temperature forecasts, skillful Kuroshio eddy predictions till 120 days, and high-fidelity turbulence simulations preserving fine-scale structures all without external forcing, with significantly surpassing baseline AI models in long-term stability and accuracy. By effectively suppressing high-frequency error accumulation, Triton offers a promising pathway towards trustworthy AI-driven simulation for climate and earth system science.

Turb-L1: Achieving Long-term Turbulence Tracing By Tackling Spectral Bias

Accurately predicting the long-term evolution of turbulence is crucial for advancing scientific understanding and optimizing engineering applications. However, existing deep learning methods face significant bottlenecks in long-term autoregressive prediction, which exhibit excessive smoothing and fail to accurately track complex fluid dynamics. Our extensive experimental and spectral analysis of prevailing methods provides an interpretable explanation for this shortcoming, identifying Spectral Bias as the core obstacle. Concretely, spectral bias is the inherent tendency of models to favor low-frequency, smooth features while overlooking critical high-frequency details during training, thus reducing fidelity and causing physical distortions in long-term predictions. Building on this insight, we propose Turb-L1, an innovative turbulence prediction method, which utilizes a Hierarchical Dynamics Synthesis mechanism within a multi-grid architecture to explicitly overcome spectral bias. It accurately captures cross-scale interactions and preserves the fidelity of high-frequency dynamics, enabling reliable long-term tracking of turbulence evolution. Extensive experiments on the 2D turbulence benchmark show that Turb-L1 demonstrates excellent performance: (I) In long-term predictions, it reduces Mean Squared Error (MSE) by $80.3\%$ and increases Structural Similarity (SSIM) by over $9\times$ compared to the SOTA baseline, significantly improving prediction fidelity. (II) It effectively overcomes spectral bias, accurately reproducing the full enstrophy spectrum and maintaining physical realism in high-wavenumber regions, thus avoiding the spectral distortions or spurious energy accumulation seen in other methods.

Neural Inverse Scattering with Score-based Regularization

Inverse scattering is a fundamental challenge in many imaging applications, ranging from microscopy to remote sensing. Solving this problem often requires jointly estimating two unknowns -- the image and the scattering field inside the object -- necessitating effective image prior to regularize the inference. In this paper, we propose a regularized neural field (NF) approach which integrates the denoising score function used in score-based generative models. The neural field formulation offers convenient flexibility to performing joint estimation, while the denoising score function imposes the rich structural prior of images. Our results on three high-contrast simulated objects show that the proposed approach yields a better imaging quality compared to the state-of-the-art NF approach, where regularization is based on total variation.

Bridging Speech Emotion Recognition and Personality: Dataset and Temporal Interaction Condition Network

This study investigates the interaction between personality traits and emotional expression, exploring how personality information can improve speech emotion recognition (SER). We collected personality annotation for the IEMOCAP dataset, and the statistical analysis identified significant correlations between personality traits and emotional expressions. To extract finegrained personality features, we propose a temporal interaction condition network (TICN), in which personality features are integrated with Hubert-based acoustic features for SER. Experiments show that incorporating ground-truth personality traits significantly enhances valence recognition, improving the concordance correlation coefficient (CCC) from 0.698 to 0.785 compared to the baseline without personality information. For practical applications in dialogue systems where personality information about the user is unavailable, we develop a front-end module of automatic personality recognition. Using these automatically predicted traits as inputs to our proposed TICN model, we achieve a CCC of 0.776 for valence recognition, representing an 11.17% relative improvement over the baseline. These findings confirm the effectiveness of personality-aware SER and provide a solid foundation for further exploration in personality-aware speech processing applications.

APCoTTA: Continual Test-Time Adaptation for Semantic Segmentation of Airborne LiDAR Point Clouds

Airborne laser scanning (ALS) point cloud segmentation is a fundamental task for large-scale 3D scene understanding. In real-world applications, models are typically fixed after training. However, domain shifts caused by changes in the environment, sensor types, or sensor degradation often lead to a decline in model performance. Continuous Test-Time Adaptation (CTTA) offers a solution by adapting a source-pretrained model to evolving, unlabeled target domains. Despite its potential, research on ALS point clouds remains limited, facing challenges such as the absence of standardized datasets and the risk of catastrophic forgetting and error accumulation during prolonged adaptation. To tackle these challenges, we propose APCoTTA, the first CTTA method tailored for ALS point cloud semantic segmentation. We propose a dynamic trainable layer selection module. This module utilizes gradient information to select low-confidence layers for training, and the remaining layers are kept frozen, mitigating catastrophic forgetting. To further reduce error accumulation, we propose an entropy-based consistency loss. By losing such samples based on entropy, we apply consistency loss only to the reliable samples, enhancing model stability. In addition, we propose a random parameter interpolation mechanism, which randomly blends parameters from the selected trainable layers with those of the source model. This approach helps balance target adaptation and source knowledge retention, further alleviating forgetting. Finally, we construct two benchmarks, ISPRSC and H3DC, to address the lack of CTTA benchmarks for ALS point cloud segmentation. Experimental results demonstrate that APCoTTA achieves the best performance on two benchmarks, with mIoU improvements of approximately 9% and 14% over direct inference. The new benchmarks and code are available at https://github.com/Gaoyuan2/APCoTTA.

Personalized Risks and Regulatory Strategies of Large Language Models in Digital Advertising

Although large language models have demonstrated the potential for personalized advertising recommendations in experimental environments, in actual operations, how advertising recommendation systems can be combined with measures such as user privacy protection and data security is still an area worthy of in-depth discussion. To this end, this paper studies the personalized risks and regulatory strategies of large language models in digital advertising. This study first outlines the principles of Large Language Model (LLM), especially the self-attention mechanism based on the Transformer architecture, and how to enable the model to understand and generate natural language text. Then, the BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) model and the attention mechanism are combined to construct an algorithmic model for personalized advertising recommendations and user factor risk protection. The specific steps include: data collection and preprocessing, feature selection and construction, using large language models such as BERT for advertising semantic embedding, and ad recommendations based on user portraits. Then, local model training and data encryption are used to ensure the security of user privacy and avoid the leakage of personal data. This paper designs an experiment for personalized advertising recommendation based on a large language model of BERT and verifies it with real user data. The experimental results show that BERT-based advertising push can effectively improve the click-through rate and conversion rate of advertisements. At the same time, through local model training and privacy protection mechanisms, the risk of user privacy leakage can be reduced to a certain extent.

AdaViP: Aligning Multi-modal LLMs via Adaptive Vision-enhanced Preference Optimization

Preference alignment through Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) has demonstrated significant effectiveness in aligning multimodal large language models (MLLMs) with human preferences. However, existing methods focus primarily on language preferences while neglecting the critical visual context. In this paper, we propose an Adaptive Vision-enhanced Preference optimization (AdaViP) that addresses these limitations through two key innovations: (1) vision-based preference pair construction, which integrates multiple visual foundation models to strategically remove key visual elements from the image, enhancing MLLMs' sensitivity to visual details; and (2) adaptive preference optimization that dynamically balances vision- and language-based preferences for more accurate alignment. Extensive evaluations across different benchmarks demonstrate our effectiveness. Notably, our AdaViP-7B achieves 93.7% and 96.4% reductions in response-level and mentioned-level hallucination respectively on the Object HalBench, significantly outperforming current state-of-the-art methods.

Conditional Independence Test Based on Transport Maps

Testing conditional independence between two random vectors given a third is a fundamental and challenging problem in statistics, particularly in multivariate nonparametric settings due to the complexity of conditional structures. We propose a novel framework for testing conditional independence using transport maps. At the population level, we show that two well-defined transport maps can transform the conditional independence test into an unconditional independence test, this substantially simplifies the problem. These transport maps are estimated from data using conditional continuous normalizing flow models. Within this framework, we derive a test statistic and prove its consistency under both the null and alternative hypotheses. A permutation-based procedure is employed to evaluate the significance of the test. We validate the proposed method through extensive simulations and real-data analysis. Our numerical studies demonstrate the practical effectiveness of the proposed method for conditional independence testing.